Sam Waksal Was Right All Along, Just Ask Him

A few months before he got out of jail, Sam Waksal sent word that he needed a new place to live, and his daughter Elana set about finding a home that would measure up to what the immunologist, biotech entrepreneur, intellectual, sophisticate, friend of Martha Stewart, former “Page Six” regular, and federally convicted inside-trader calls “my aesthetic.”

Waksal had been set back a bit by prison, but never entirely brought low. During what he euphemistically waves off as “my time away,” many of his belongings lay in storage: his Jean-Michel Frank furniture from the forties; much of his art, including a Rothko, some works by Cy Twombly, and a world-class collection of rare Etruscan pottery, some of which he found himself on faraway digs; and his beloved books—“old volumes, as old as I can get them,” like an eighteenth-century French translation of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy. And last summer, upon his conditional release from a halfway house in the Bronx, Waksal had everything moved into a peaceful apartment his family had found for him—not in Soho, where he’d famously lived, worked, and thrown fabulous parties, but on the Upper East Side.

“I decided it was actually hipper than Soho—especially since I’m living here now,” Waksal says. He means it as a joke. “When I came back, Soho was sort of, you know, like a shopping mall. Being in exile, one of the things that was terrible was the brutality of the aesthetic. It’s brutal. And where I am right now, it is not.”